This is an email I just wrote to Facebook.
Dear Facebook,
Thank you for hosting the worlds biggest party and inviting everyone I know. They are all here. From people I took the school bus with, to people that took me places. I might have never met all of them IRL, but we have popped into our existence thanks to your "chat" application.
In balance, there's a guilty pleasure in interacting with a stranger on the Internet. In my case, the three variables, guilt, pleasure, and stranger, are a bit askew thanks to a neurological condition that's made me lose memory. Everyone on my 'Friends' list is a stranger, and not everyone who isn't, is.
So how do I relate to them?
It's all in the logs. Scanning through logs helps me piece together memories like no advancement in medical science. I'm re-building my life, one log at a time.
This is where I find Facebook lacking. There are no chat logs for me to browse through. My list of friends include software engineers, software journalists, scholars, lawyers, and more who I engage with in intellectual discussions. Or maybe even small talk.
Chat logs help me understand the nature of the conversation, and my relationship with the "Friend". Nothing offsets the guilt-pleasure equilibrium than say for example, talking about legal realism with a virtualization engineer. Catch my drift?
Previous interactions help set context and assist in building relevance into current conversations.
If you could spare an engineer or two and add this as an opt-on, disabled-by-default feature, you'll have one very glad user.
Cheers!
Mayank
geekybodhi.net
